University of Pennsylvania, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2009 Dec;21(12):2434-44. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.21179.
For over a century, a link between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains elusive. Recent advances in both the study of sentence processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function suggest an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition between incompatible characterizations of a linguistic stimulus may recruit top-down cognitive control processes mediated by prefrontal cortex. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that individuals use shared prefrontal neural circuitry during two very different tasks-color identification under Stroop conflict and sentence comprehension under conditions of syntactic ambiguity-both of which putatively rely on cognitive control processes. We report the first demonstration of within-subject overlap in neural responses to syntactic and nonsyntactic conflict. These findings serve to clarify the role of Broca's area in, and the neural and psychological organization of, the language processing system.
一个多世纪以来，人们一直认为左前额叶皮层与语言处理之间存在联系，但这种联系的确切特征仍然难以捉摸。最近在句子处理研究和额叶功能神经科学研究方面的进展提出了一个有趣的可能性：解决语言刺激之间不兼容特征竞争的需求可能会招募由前额叶皮层介导的自上而下的认知控制过程。我们使用功能磁共振成像来测试这样一个假设，即在两种非常不同的任务中，个体使用共享的前额叶神经回路——在斯特鲁普冲突下进行颜色识别和在句法歧义条件下进行句子理解——这两种任务都依赖于认知控制过程。我们报告了第一个关于对句法和非句法冲突的神经反应的个体内重叠的证明。这些发现有助于阐明布罗卡区在语言处理系统中的作用，以及其神经和心理组织。
